As a kid, I burned through a lot of hobbies and phases. There was the NES, pogs, trading cards, and I was huge on comic books. I still have them all, stored away in plastic cases and as (probably) worthless as ever. Nonetheless, these are pieces of nostalgia that I don’t want to let go. Knowing that a lot of my favorite comic books exist online forever would make letting go a lot easier, though.

Read along in this article and I’ll show you how you can find, save, and read some of the oldest and most classic comic books on your Windows PC.

AIBQ has been around forever and is probably the best resource when it comes to preserving popular, classic comic books online. You’re going to want to head straight to the Catalog page and you’ll quickly see just how vast the collection is, currently with over 900 comics available for download.

They’ve currently got 44 series indexed in their database:

All Humor Comics

America’s Greatest Comics

Andy Devine Western

Barker

Beware Terror Tales

Bill Battles the One Man Army

Bill Boyd Western

Blackhawk

Bob Colt

Bob Swift

Buccaneers

Buster Bear

Bulletman

Campus Loves

Captain Marvel Adventures

Doll Man

Exotic Romances

Exploits of Daniel Boone

Gabby

GI Sweethearts

Hickory

Hopalong Cassidy

Intrigue

Jonesy

Ken Shannon

Lady Luck

Love Secrets

Marmaduke Mouse

Marvel Family

Mary Marvel

Mighty Midget

Minute Man

Nickel Comics

National Comics

Plastic Man

Police Comics

Rocky Lane Western

Smash Comics

Spy Smasher

Strange Suspense Stories

Sweethearts

This Magazine is Haunted

T-Man

Yanks in Battle

After clicking the cover of whatever series you’re interested in, you’ll see a list of issues. If the issue is marked as unavailable, you will not be able to download it from this website.

Clicking on an issue that is available will bring up a prompt to download a CBR file. Save that file to wherever you’d like. Now, we need a quality comic reader. That’s where ComicRack comes in. We’ve done a nice article about ComicRack in the past, but I’ll give you a little refresher course.

After you’ve installed and run ComicRack, click on the tab that says “Folders” at the bottom left of the application. From here, navigate to wherever your CBR is stored. Mine’s on my desktop.

Like my screenshot shows, once you’ve selected the appropriate folder, all books in that folder will be displayed in a thumbnail view. From there, just double click on the book you’re interested in reading.

From there, just use the navigation bar to scroll through the comic as you read. The navigation bar is near the top of the screen. Optionally, you can use your mouse wheel to scroll up and down through pages. No more rough edges or page creasing!

I hope this helps mend the poor hearts of those of you who trashed all those comic books you had as a kid. Leave me a comment and let me know what your all-time favorite comic is! Oh and don’t forget to check out our free comics manual, Bam! Your Guide To Cool Online Comic Books by Lachlan Roy, which also features other comic sources and comic software.

I find ComicRack to be large and bloated. I use CDisplayEx Portable as my CBR/CBZ reader (and ACV on my Android tablet).

I prefer to manage my own collections (both comics and music) in folders, and can't stand things like iTunes and the like that want to move my files around and build an (unnecessary) database and waste HD space.